from
the sea (5) - Baubo’s bird ludes by freda karpf
Once she learned that
mathematicians could see images when working their formulas, Mrs. Scattergood
tried to imagine the shapes and colors that filled their heads. Equations
peddled past her eyes. The seeming
disorder of the stars was entwined in a logarithmic snake dance. Form
self-replicating form. Mandelbrot lived through the hell of World War II. It took Mandelbrot to show us how to make
order out of chaos. There was something
out there, a force, an energy, something that possessed the form, called to it
like an alluring smell from the kitchen.
However you like to imagine being called, this call to a new pattern, a
different form entwined everything around it. That is the Mandelbrot set formed
by the strange attractor.
~
An archetype is a symbol. But it’s also a
vehicle that carries passengers. All the passengers in the vehicle are related
even if they don’t know it. Something
moved through her, brought Mrs. Scattergood into its stream.
~
Something about the stream struck her as
familiar and alluring. That combination,
familiar and alluring, was always too strong to resist. The allure was that it was a tease into the
future Mrs. Scattergood wanted, the familiar was the predicate she could baste
the future in. Slow going in the cold
water till she reached that magnetic time of positive and negative in harmony
but not neutral. If the gods moved
through their tundra of archetypes she could as well.
~
Nobody is that important. It’s all
important. Aldo Leopold, ecology’s god of the interconnecting pieces can save
us from ourselves, if we only listen and save all the pieces. It’s in the
details, in the discoveries, it is the young learning and caring; it is about
that and it is about living longer and bringing your wisdom down to the
community center where you can spin tales and have little nips along the way.
~
Mrs. Scattergood stirred the soup until
she began to wonder what she was supposed to add next. The momentary thought vanished however and
she continued presenting her story to Baubo, as if she were there. Baubo was
inside Mrs. Scattergood’s head. Is that
the same if you’re having a dialogue? No, it is an interior monologue. If it
were a body of water it would be a cove.
~
A story from where Mrs. Scattergood grew,
Newark, was how many of the Jewish women went to the ocean in the summer. They
were the old salts. Each Yiddish word Mrs. Scattergood hears warms the memory
of each person she knew from Newark until they glow. Her mother feared losing her Yiddish. The few words Mrs. Scattergood knew, she feared
losing one after another. What would happen if the language died? Details of our stories touch places in our
worlds that can’t be found on a map. She only knew some Yiddish as intuitively
as she knew how to make soup.
~
While Baubo was roaming about Mrs.
Scattergood’s salt marsh she got to know the neighborhood a bit as well. Mrs. Scattergood had neighbors but she was
lucky to have privacy too. She could see them but they couldn’t see her cottage
from the street. Through the bushes she
could see one neighbor’s daily walk carried on with urgency and
determination. No lollygagging love of
nature anywhere in her bones. How’d she
know it was her? Only she walks like
she’s riding on a camel. ‘One hump or
two,’ Baubo was laughing to herself. Mrs. Scattergood and Baubo both found the
need for daily exercise either amusing, appalling or too much trouble.
~
‘Sleep so ephemeral until we wipe it from
our eyes’, Baubo remembered brushing the salt from Mrs. Scattergood’s eyebrows.
A days’ ocean on her and not a fresh shower. Skin pinching. She remembered the
woman at the beach complaining, “This salt is eating me! It’s eating my
skin!” What would pickles say if they
could talk? Baubo mocked herself, “Again
with the pickles!”
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